Although Amazon’s blocking and punishing of third-party malicious payment behavior is applauded, it is a good thing for compliant sellers. But nowadays, the competition among many sellers on the platform has become fierce, and for most sellers, there are really not many ways to increase the number of reviews when the customer review rate continues to decline. There was an “Early Reviewer Program” before, but Amazon also canceled it in April 2021. Since then, it has become increasingly difficult for new and old sellers to obtain reviews, so what are the officially recognized and operational ways to obtain reviews? Let’s take a look.
1. VINE VOICE
VINE VOICE is what we often call “green label reviews”, which were previously (Amazon Vendor Exprss (VE for short), Amazon Vendor Central (VC for short) is an exclusive benefit for sellers. According to Amazon’s official statistics, after sellers used the VINE program, their sales increased by 19.6%, which is very helpful for sellers.
Now Amazon has opened VINE permissions to all compliant brand registered sellers, but they will charge a project fee of $200 per product, and the VINE quota is limited. For the time being, only 5 products can be applied for at the same time.
According to past experience, during the period of participating in the VINE program, our listing only received 1 3-star review. Later, when checking the customer’s Amazon homepage, we found that this customer who habitually rated 3 stars could The requirements for products are relatively high, and most of the other reviews are 5-star reviews.
However, during the training, I also met sellers who received 1-star VINE reviews. During the communication, I found that the products did have certain defects. Therefore, for the VINE evaluation project, the only thing sellers need to pay attention to is to ensure the quality of the products and have enough confidence in the products, otherwise VINE users are likely to leave bad reviews, which will not be worth the loss.
2. Evaluation merging mechanism
Amazon has more than 20 sites around the world. In order to facilitate the global management of Listing data, Amazon will merge the evaluation of a single Listing, which we call “evaluation merging”. This “evaluation merging” will have two forms of display.
1) Listing variant evaluation merging
Variation is a general term for Amazon to refer to the same Listing with different attribute SKUs. Each variant is a product with its own ASIN and a relatively independent sales status, but through the definition of the parent ASIN, all variants belong to the same product series. Therefore, the data of some variants is shared with Listing, such as “customer evaluation” information. Based on this feature, the reviews left by customers after purchasing the target variant will be counted in the summary reviews of the Listing. In other words, the reviews that users see when they open the Listing include customer reviews for all variants, which is called “variant review merging”.
If the new product that the seller lists belongs to the same product series, you can add a new variant to the Listing. In this way, the new product can instantly share the review data accumulated in the previous Listing, thereby increasing exposure and conversion rate.
2) Global review merging of Listing
Thanks to Amazon’s global sales network, sellers can sell the same product (ASIN) on different country sites, such as the United States, Australia, and Europe. At this time, Amazon will synchronize the reviews of the same ASIN across regions and cities, which we call “global review merging”. In this way, the Listing can accumulate more customer reviews.
In summary, whether it is the merging of variant reviews or global reviews, for the optimization of new products, the seller’s Listing ranking performance can take the lead in the early stages of promotion.